Eventuality in Fiction: Contingency, Complexity and

Narrative
Richard Walsh

Narrative, Volume 30, Number 3, October 2022, pp. 287-303 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2022.0048

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/865617

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 Richard Walsh

Eventuality in Fiction: Contingency,

Complexity and Narrative

ABSTRACT: This essay seizes upon the tension between two senses of “eventuality,”
as concerning the staple of narrative, events, and as concerning the kind of contin-
gency that remains unassimilated by narrative sense. Contingency is a manifestation
of the gap between the systemic complexity of temporal phenomena and the reductive
heuristic of narrative as a mode of cognition. Sophisticated forms of narrative, how-
ever, may choose to confront this gap rather than merely exhibit it, as part of their
continual effort to refine narrative and finesse its limitations. The possibility of doing
so arises because of two features inherent in narrative form itself, which are its latent
reflexiveness and its dependence upon the implicit. “One of the Missing,” by Ambrose
Bierce, serves as the means through which these ideas are elaborated in more concrete
terms, exhibiting as it does both a self-conscious concern with contingency and narra-
tive, and an implicit potentiality beyond its imposition of narrative logic.

KEYWORDS: eventuality, complexity, contingency, reflexiveness, narrative cognition

Richard Walsh is a Professor of Narrative Studies in the Department of English and Related Literature
at the University of York, UK, and the Founding Director of York’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative
Studies. He is a past President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, the author of Novel
Arguments (1995) and The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007), and co-editor of Narratology and Ideology
(2018), Narrating Complexity (2018) and Fictionality and Literature (2022, forthcoming). His work ranges
over literary, cultural, and cognitive topics in narrative theory, including reflexiveness and ideology in
fiction; fictionality within and beyond fiction; narrative across media; emergent and interactive narrative;
narrative and selfhood; narrative creativity and cognition; and the limits of narrative representation.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 30, No. 3 (October 2022)

Copyright © 2022 by The Ohio State University
288  Richard Walsh

THE TERM “EVENTUALITY” captures narrative’s inherent concern with events,

but it also connotes two contrasting ideas: the first is a determinate progression
towards an outcome of the sort that is comprehended by narrative “logic” (or the el-
ementary sense-making afforded by narrative form); the second is the unforeseeable
circumstance of a contingency, a chance occurrence, which eludes narrative logic.
Contingency, on this view, marks the gap that opens up between the reductive but
efficient sense-making of narrative and the unmanageable systemic complexity of
experience. Manifestations of contingency in narrative are symptomatic of the way
our cognitive dependence upon a basic narrative logic strongly constrains how we
understand complexity; but this limitation of narrative may itself be foregrounded as
a problem. Sophisticated cultural forms of narrative, including literary fiction, work
to loosen the constraints of narrative’s reductive logic—principally by exploiting two
intrinsic features of narrative itself, which are its reflexiveness, and the irreducible
narrative function of the implicit. Literary fiction reflexively chafes at the limits of
narrative sense-making in multiple respects, by subjecting narrative logic to the com-
plex processes of its own articulation within a semiotic system. In doing so it displaces
interpretative interest from its sequential logic onto the circulation of meaning within
the complex networks of signification that narrative itself cannot help generating.
This disposition of literary fiction is inherent in its formal self-consciousness and
has, I suggest, two antithetical effects. One is that its reflexive movement continually
confronts narrative sense-making with the limit of its power, in the unassimilable
form of contingency; the other is that it continually returns to the frontier of incipient
sense, in the mind’s efforts to comprehend phenomena—the threshold of emergent
meaning where narrative cognition supervenes upon embodied experience. Through
such a double movement, literary fiction sustains an equilibrium between affirmation
and critique of narrative meaning, and indeed there is a dynamic reciprocity between
the two. Even the bleakest view, just to the extent that it is successfully articulated,
does more than it says; but equally, its value lies in the doing, the process, not in
arrival at any final ground in meaning, and no pretension to the latter will withstand
scepticism. I pursue this line of inquiry here by adopting Ambrose Bierce’s story, “One
of the Missing,” as its vehicle. Theory, here, does not find its rationale in interpretation
of the chosen text, because the ultimate interest lies with the theoretical ideas rather
than the reading itself. But neither does the text function as a basis for inductive
generalisation: its purpose is not to provide empirical support for the theoretical ar-
gument, which must stand on its own merits, but rather to articulate the theoretical
ideas in a particular narrative context.1
Bierce’s “One of the Missing” is an American Civil War story that foregrounds
improbable contingencies, and attempts to motivate them in significantly contrasting
ways.2 The story’s double representational gesture manifests a tension between sys-
temic and narrative models of causality, and further leads me to distinguish between
Bierce’s own communicative purposes and the textual dynamics of the story itself.
Critical readings of the story often lean heavily upon the assumption of a strongly
moralistic intention on Bierce’s part, founded upon the role of the satirist that was the
core of his literary persona. But Bierce’s satirical stance is so comprehensive in scope
that it approaches a universal cynicism, so that the very possibility of a well-founded
 Eventuality in Fiction   289

moral perspective is itself undermined. In these circumstances it can no longer be

a premise that the characters and their actions are held accountable to an order of
values; instead, the very possibility of such an order becomes a problem. Bierce’s
civil war stories, including “One of the Missing,” do in fact thematise perspectival
problems of value and fact, not least in response to the destructive chaos of civil war
itself, and to the subjective experience of trauma. This thematics is implicated in his
recurrent defamiliarization of his characters’ experiences of space and time, as in the
story for which he is perhaps best known, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”3 But
Bierce’s own foregrounded thematic purposes are subsumed by the textual complexi-
ties of his story, which ramify beyond plausible attribution to any authorial intention
other than a broad gesture of dissatisfaction with the consolations of narrative form.
To this extent, his narrative’s relation to its own semiotic resources becomes perfor-
mative, mirroring the insufficiency of narrative sense to the complex causal dynamics
of real-world systemic processes, while generating a systemic complexity of its own
through the excess of connotation that accompanies every strategy of narrative inte-
gration he deploys.
“One of the Missing” is set at Kennesaw Mountain, where Bierce himself, serv-
ing in the Union Army, suffered a serious head wound inflicted by a Confederate
sharpshooter. The story centres upon a Union scout, Jerome Searing, who undertakes
a reconnaissance mission beyond the front line and discovers that the enemy are in
retreat. Instead of returning immediately to report this information, he loads his rifle
with the intention of firing upon the distant troops. At the same time, a Confederate
captain of artillery takes a pot shot at what he believes to be a group of Union officers,
misses, and demolishes the farm building that Searing is using for cover. Searing
regains consciousness to find himself in an extraordinary situation: he is half-buried
and immobilised in the rubble of the collapsed building, while his own hair-triggered
rifle has fallen so that it is now pointing directly at his forehead. All his efforts to move
or to turn the rifle aside are frustrated, and eventually his mounting terror provokes
him to thrust a piece of wood against the trigger. He dies, but from heart failure,
not a bullet—the rifle had discharged when the building collapsed. Later, the Union
army, having received independent intelligence of the Confederate retreat, advances
past the collapsed building. Only Lieutenant Adrian Searing notices the body, but he
does not recognize his brother, mistaking him for a Confederate soldier because he
is covered in grey dust. The Lieutenant concludes from the gaunt, rigid features of
the dead man that he has been dead for a week. In fact, just twenty-two minutes have
passed since the collapse of the building.
It is worth distinguishing the different ways in which contingency manifests in
this story. There are, first of all, ordinary contingencies of the sort that every narrative
is bound to include—incidental contingencies, unremarked and assumed as mere
circumstance. There is neither a compelling reason why such circumstances should
be so, nor any obvious objection to them being so. It is circumstantial that Searing’s
route through the woods should lead him to some derelict farm buildings, for exam-
ple; it is circumstantial that the Union troops gain intelligence of the Confederate
retreat independently of, and simultaneously with, Searing’s reconnaissance mission.
Both of these circumstances are essential to the story, but the story makes nothing of
290  Richard Walsh

them. Such contingency is peripheral and taken for granted, and so does not disrupt
the logic of narrative; it is only when contingency is foregrounded that narrative
intelligibility is obstructed by the manifestation of chance. This foregrounding is, in
general terms, an effect produced by two kinds of anomaly: one has to do with the
violation of representational criteria of plausibility, the other to do with the discursive
imposition of arbitrary narrative form. These two narrative features are not indepen-
dent of each other.
The most flagrant chance event in “One of the Missing” is the way the farm
building’s collapse produces a situation in which Searing is alive but immobilised
beneath the rubble, while the rifle he has just cocked has fallen in such a way that it
is now aimed at his head, and he is unable to move, or to move the rifle, in any way
except to ram a length of timber against its trigger. The story works hard to mitigate
the improbability of this circumstance in several ways: it emphasises the “confusion
of timbers” in the “crazy edifice” even before the artillery shell strikes it (78); it goes
into detail about the configuration of beams, boards and debris that results (80–81);
it naturalizes Searing’s position with respect to the rifle, which presents to his vision
little more than the ring of metal that is its muzzle, by noting that he is “somewhat
familiar with the aspect of rifles from that point of view” (82–83); and it offers as a
precedent Searing’s memory of unwittingly advancing in the face of a heavy can-
non, only at the last moment realising the significance of the brass ring in front of
him (83). It also provides a narrative precedent for Searing’s belief both that a slight
disturbance might discharge the rifle, because of its hair trigger, and that the violent
collapse of the building has nonetheless not done so. This memory, of an occasion
when he used his own loaded and cocked rifle to club a man to death (84), merely
duplicates and highlights the improbability inherent in the current situation as he
understands it (though in this case he is mistaken, as it turns out); the improbable
nature of the situation is not effaced. Nonetheless, the anecdote (like Bierce’s other
devices) assimilates it to criteria of plausibility through a kind of narrative thickening.
There is a curious double movement to the narrative strategy Bierce employs.
The result of the building’s collapse is an eventuality, in the sense of a particular
narrative outcome, that is essential to the story, and as such it is simply a premise,
impervious to the reader’s scepticism. Yet it is also highly improbable, and in this re-
spect it foregrounds the connection between “eventuality” and contingency (as when,
for example, we brace ourselves against the occurrence of “unforeseen eventualities”).
Every device that Bierce exploits to incorporate this eventuality within norms of
narrative credibility does so by confronting, and so foregrounding, its extraordinary
contingency. Even as the devices serve their purpose of consolidating the narrative
intelligibility of the represented event, they draw attention to the way improbable
contingencies are inherently resistant to narrative explanation.
An eventuality may be most broadly defined as a change of state, and in that
sense it is the outcome of an event (etymologically, “event” itself means “outcome”;
here we have in miniature the infinite regress at the root of narrative logic). The form
of an event, as distinct from the perpetual seething flux of change in itself, is specifi-
cally narrative. That is to say, narrative at the most basic level is the mode of cognition
to which we primarily resort in order to make sense of change—to find form in it,
 Eventuality in Fiction   291

and so gain a conceptual grasp upon it. The basic form that narrative privileges is
sequential: one thing leads to another. It is a rough-and-ready mode of sense making,
a cognitively efficient heuristic that evidently proved adaptive for an intelligent social
animal, and was amenable to further consolidation and elaboration through nurture
and, more generally, culture. Intrinsic to narrative cognition’s formal, social and an-
thropocentric premises, however, are a number of presuppositions that it imposes
upon phenomena in more or less tendentious ways. Narrative form inherently im-
plies assumptions of agency, intentionality, perspectivalism, evaluative relevance, and
teleology, among others.4 Narrative cognition is also pragmatic, in that its adaptive
efficacy depends only upon achieving a “good enough” balance between coping with
experience and the cognitive effort required to do so. Accordingly, narrative cogni-
tion has horizons, beyond which we lapse from the domain of achieved meaning back
into brute experience, the knowledge by acquaintance of an immediate embodied
relation to our environment. For this reason, while the event is a formal achieve-
ment of narrative comprehension, its internal logic remains unexamined in practice,
and ultimately enigmatic in principle. Where the eventuality is unremarkable, it is
acceptably unexamined for ordinary purposes, and even where it is unaccountably
improbable, further narrative elaboration might reduce the immediate enigma to
acceptably unexamined commonplaces. But decomposing the event into sub-events
does not lead us to solid ground, and not only because the sequential enigma may
reappear within those sub-events themselves. In fact, if we push too far in this direc-
tion, the connective logic of narrative becomes more and more inevitably enigmatic,
ever more remote from the familiar territory of the taken for granted. Narrative may
offer expedient sense in the form of the event, but when pressed beyond its heuristic
function it always raises more questions than it answers.
It is inherent in eventuality, then, that it presents both an intelligible, narrative
face and an unaccountable face that eludes narrative sense. Bierce’s most extravagant
expression of this double logic does not focus upon the highly improbable situation
in which Searing finds himself, but upon the precursor to that situation, the circum-
stantial fact that a shell demolishes the building in which he is hidden. To account
for this event Bierce goes on an elaborate digression, involving the birth of a child
near the Carpathian Mountains, his growth into a military career, his disgrace and
exile, his arrival in New Orleans (rather than New York) and consequent enlistment
to the Confederate cause, and hence his presence as an artillery captain at Kennesaw
Mountain. This highly condensed biography only converges with the main narrative
at the point when this same captain, “having nothing better to do while awaiting
his turn to pull out and be off, amused himself by sighting a field-piece obliquely
to his right at what he mistook for some Federal officers on the crest of a hill, and
discharged it” (77). The point of the digression is to highlight the vast web of cir-
cumstance involved in such an eventuality; to insist upon the extent to which the
event itself is dwarfed by the magnitude of the systemic context constituting the set
of conditions for this outcome, “the concurrence of an infinite number of favoring
influences and their preponderance over an infinite number of opposing ones” (76).
Bierce gestures towards multiple dimensions of this systemic complexity, yet he can
only express its totality by resorting again to narrative, albeit in an archly ironic way.
292  Richard Walsh

This inconceivable complex of contingencies, he suggests, has been overseen “from

the beginning of time” by “the Power charged with the execution of the work accord-
ing to the design” (76). Bierce attempts to convey the intricately systemic nature of
the relations between circumstances bearing upon this eventuality, yet does so by
framing it within a narrative conceit that subordinates the whole to the agency of an
omniscient intelligence, for whom the “desired result”—this eventuality—is a final
cause teleologically determining the orchestration of everything that comes before.
“Had anything in all this vast concatenation been overlooked Private Searing
might have fired on the retreating Confederates that morning” (77). This counterfac-
tual statement, in which a slight change anywhere in the preceding context may have
radically changed the outcome, anticipates the form of the most famous illustration
of the non-linearity of complex systems, Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect”; that is,
the idea that a tiny variable, such as whether or not a butterfly flaps its wings, can
make the difference between two significantly divergent trajectories in the behaviour
of a huge meteorological system. But Bierce’s narrative conceit of a guiding agency
also anticipates the way in which Lorenz’s example, and our cognitive dependence
upon narrative, encourage misunderstanding. The butterfly effect illustrates sensitive
dependence upon initial conditions—the potentially radical difference between the
weather system with the butterfly and the weather system without the butterfly. It is
our narrative bias that translates this systemic idea into the notion that the butterfly
“causes” the hurricane (or whatever outcome is hypothesised); as if it were possible,
even in principle, to trace a series of consequences leading from the butterfly’s act
to a later state of the entire system. A system’s behaviour is systemic, not sequential;
the significance of the butterfly does not lie in its positive agency but in the variation
it represents between two sets of systemic relations, a vanishingly small difference
between two states of the meteorological totality.
There is another reason, however, for Bierce’s assimilation of systemic contin-
gency to a narrative model involving agency, intentionality, (omniscient) perspective,
and teleology, and this has to do with the circumstance that he is writing fiction. His
concern is not really to explain the eventuality on which his story centres, because
his point is not that this is something that really happened. As a fiction, the story
is much more concerned with the negotiation of values in narrative than with any
directly informative purpose. It is important, certainly, that Bierce’s Civil War stories
are grounded in personal experience. Almost uniquely among significant figures in
American literature, Bierce saw action himself in the war (including the Battle of
Kennesaw Mountain), and sustained a serious head wound from a sniper’s bullet.5
These facts bear upon “One of the Missing” directly, in its concern for historical ac-
curacy and realistic detail, but also obliquely, in the way they inform its rhetorical
negotiation of values. Critical commentary upon the story has tended to see it as
strongly moralistic in tone, even if there is room for disagreement about the exact
nature of its moral import.6 Such views seem to be supported by the ostentatiously
cosmic determinacy to which Bierce subordinates the contingencies of his narrative.
Whether the guiding power is understood as a deity or as Fate, its intentionality is
explicitly guided by formal values, by a transcendent ethics mediated as aesthetics:
what has been “decreed” is for the sake of “the harmony of the pattern,” a “design”
 Eventuality in Fiction   293

that must not be “marred” (76). “Nothing had been neglected—at every step in the
progress of both these men’s lives, and in the lives of their contemporaries and an-
cestors, and in the lives of the contemporaries of their ancestors, the right thing had
been done to bring about the desired result” (77). Another term we might invoke
to characterise the necessity of the desired result, this specific eventuality, is “poetic
justice.” Searing, whose virtues as a soldier are strongly highlighted at the beginning
of the story, proves at exactly this point to be morally base. He neglects his clear duty
to return immediately to his commanding officers and report the vital information
he has just discovered, in favour of the “singularly tempting” opportunity to send a
bullet from his sniper rifle arbitrarily into the column of retiring Confederate troops
(75). Bierce uses the word “murder” to characterize Searing’s intended act, a moral
judgement all the more forceful in a context of warfare that would generally render
the concept moot (76). On this view, there is a clear logic to the intervention of Fate at
this point, grounded not in narrative representation but in fictive rhetoric.
Such moralistic readings of the story credit it with an ethical assurance it does
not really possess, however, and that it does not assert. It certainly transpires that the
story’s opening paragraphs present a hollow image of Searing as a heroic figure, but if
he proves no better than other men, Bierce does not suggest he is worse. So, Searing’s
motive for repeatedly refusing promotion is not noble (he evidently enjoys being a
sniper), but neither is there inherent nobility in accepting promotion. His brother,
the lieutenant, is a contrasting figure in several respects, but the contrast offers no
clear moral alignment. Lieutenant Searing is “mechanically” (91) preoccupied with
his pocket watch (more on this later) and complacent in drawing faulty inferences:
“‘Dead a week,’ said the officer curtly, moving on and absently pulling out his watch
as if to verify his estimate of time” (92). He also fails to draw other important infer-
ences, such as connecting the collapsed building with the “clatter of a falling building”
he had heard shortly before (91); and he displays no curiosity about the fate of his
brother, who had so recently set out into these woods from the part of the Union line
under his command. Similarly, the story seems to set up the Confederate artillery
captain as a candidate for moral contrast with Searing, yet it tells us explicitly that
this captain fled his native country in military disgrace, that his motive for firing his
field-piece was boredom, that he wrongly identified his target, and that he missed.7
Searing’s intention to fire upon the retreating Confederates is pre-empted when he is
himself inadvertently fired upon, and the reversal looks like poetic justice; but Bierce
emphasises its contingency, and indeed the counterfactual contingency of what might
otherwise have occurred, noting that Searing himself “would perhaps have missed”
(77). If anything, the irony is at the expense of the conceit of providential oversight he
has just elaborated. The scope of Bierce’s irony expands, and it remains unclear what
positive moral ground, if any, anchors it. He observes, at the moment Searing cocks
his rifle, that “it is the business of a soldier to kill. It is also his habit if he is a good sol-
dier” (76). There is certainly irony lurking here, and we would be entitled to read it as
focalization of Searing’s own attitude; but Bierce also observes, with much less sense
of internal focalization, that to face firearms “with malevolent eyes blazing behind
them . . . is what a soldier is for” (83). The two statements are complementary, and the
irony seems less to do with Searing than with Bierce’s own ambivalence about war.
294  Richard Walsh

Bierce’s anti-heroic view of warfare is well established in the criticism, but it is

clearly not an affirmation of countervailing values of pacifism or peaceful society.
His ironic view of war did not afford him a foundation in positive values beyond it,
and he remained caught up in an unresolved relation to “the martial spirit” right up
to his presumed death in Mexico in 1914.8 The untethered quality of Bierce’s irony is
manifest in passages like the following:

. . . in a moment of mental abstraction he had clubbed his rifle and beaten

out another gentleman’s brains, observing afterward that the weapon which
he had been diligently swinging by the muzzle was loaded, capped, and at
full cock—knowledge of which circumstance would doubtless have cheered
his antagonist to longer endurance. (84)

This sentence is framed as Searing’s recollection, but its style and register recogniz-
ably belong to Bierce. It is remote from Searing’s idiom, and the thrust of its irony,
especially in the last clause, is irrelevant to his concerns, which centre upon the rifle’s
sensitive trigger and his own lucky escape. The chilling humour of that last authorial
aside encapsulates the nihilistic quality of Bierce’s irony; it does not ironize certain
values so much as the possibility of value itself.
If Bierce regards his material with an exceptionally cold eye, however, he also
engages in a sustained imaginative engagement with Searing’s subjective experience.
The title of the story, in fact, directs our attention here. “One of the Missing” does not
foreground a moral examination of its protagonist, but rather the fact that his fate
remains obscure to the world. The circumstances of Searing’s death remain unknown
to any but himself, as in the case of many casualties of the Civil War (and as, ulti-
mately, in the case of Bierce’s own death). More generally, the subjective experience
of death always remains untold, except in fiction; dying could be the master trope
for the enigma of eventuality. Imagining the manner of a fictional character’s death
can hardly amount to a gain in understanding of the particular case, of course—and
empathy, especially in Bierce’s oeuvre, seems the wrong concept. However, fiction
does offer its particularity as the vehicle for a displaced imaginative reflection upon
whatever general (typical, moral, ideological, conceptual, theoretical, metaphysical)
significance it may be taken to connote. Which is to say, in standard critical language,
fiction directs us to a thematic level of interpretation; or better, it achieves its signif-
icance by attending reflexively to its own narrative particulars, so that their status as
facts is superseded by their instantiation of values.
The exploration of values is intrinsic to the literary use of narrative. Of course,
any use of narrative entails evaluative commitments; but the formal and thematic
defamiliarization of such unreflective commitments is at the core of literary fiction’s
cultural role. Questions of value are also central, more specifically, to Bierce’s narra-
tive negotiations with chance and complexity. Chance, within a narrative paradigm,
is the negation of meaning; it is the arbitrary, the random, the causeless, and so the
failure of narrative sense. When it appears unreflectively in fiction it is typically a
flaw; it is the unwarranted deus ex machina that resolves plot difficulties without
satisfying narrative logic. For the same reason, though, its self-conscious use is one
 Eventuality in Fiction   295

of the ways fiction tests and challenges the limits of narrative sense-making. Doing
so is integral to fiction’s cultural efforts to refine or extend the capacity of narrative,
but such efforts always risk the breakdown of meaning—a mere lapse from narrative
coherence, and from the articulation of value it affords. Literary fiction, then, involves
a double movement of narrative disruption and recuperation, and in this it is, in one
sense, well served by an appeal to systemic complexity. A narrative representation of
egregiously contingent events can be recuperated by shifting to a systemic perspec-
tive, in which those events are situated as effects of a whole network of interactions
too reciprocal, simultaneous, and recursive to be traced in a narrative line. In this
light, apparent randomness (in narrative form) is reimagined and recuperated as de-
terminate within a systemic model. However, the recuperation of apparent chance as
complexity proves to be an equally intractable narrative problem in itself. While the
form of a narrative’s events may be motivated as the emergent effect of systemic pro-
cesses, those systemic processes themselves elude narrative intelligibility. Unless, of
course, they are subordinated to the hypothetical perspective of some narrative agent
capable of comprehending and directing the whole, which is just what Bierce does,
with a derisively ironic recognition that the whole exercise has secured him nothing.
In literary terms we may wish to say that an interrogation of values, however negative
its findings, has value in itself; but this is not the communicative thrust of Bierce’s
story. Far from being a moral tale, it is an expression of nihilism; or—to be more cir-
cumspect—of the failure of narrative understanding to establish foundational values
that will stand against his own excoriating satirical eye.
Bierce’s narrative interrogation of the consolations of narrative occurs both at
the communicative level of the authorial discourse and, figuratively, through the
represented perspective of Searing himself; this is one of many formal doublings
and parallelisms that structure the story. As such, it also exemplifies the reflexive
movement by which fiction always turns its attention upon itself, and which becomes
the first principle of complexification in literary fictions. This move is epitomized in
the central situation of the story, the motif of the gun turned against its owner. That
device is itself foreshadowed early on, as Searing disappears into the woods: “‘That
is the last of him,’ said one of the men; ‘I wish I had his rifle; those fellows will hurt
some of us with it’” (73). And of course the motif is also, in a larger sense, a figure
for civil war itself. The strong metaphorical import of Searing’s situation after the
collapse of the building raises the question of whether we should take it literally at
all. At first sight, it could plausibly be read as a variation upon the device of “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which the protagonist’s intrepid escape from
hanging and return home, elaborated over more than half the story, proves ultimately
to occur only in his imagination at the point of death (27–45). However, we have to
refuse the temptation to conclude, by analogy, that Searing died in the collapse of the
building—which is the cause of death his brother infers when he comes across the
unrecognized corpse. Other physical evidence contributing to Lieutenant Searing’s
deduction actually contradicts it. He sees the effects of rigor mortis, and a week of
dew, in Searing’s distorted features and damp hair; we are obliged to read them as the
signs of his psychological trauma.
296  Richard Walsh

Searing endured that trauma, Bierce tells us, for less than twenty-two minutes.
The disparity between this fact and Searing’s own experience of it foregrounds Bierce’s
concern with temporal disorientation as a symptom of trauma, and is the real basis
for comparison between his two stories. It is reasonable to speculate that Bierce’s
imaginative engagement with trauma was informed by first-hand experience; but this
preoccupation with deformed temporality also links it specifically to his problems
with narrative. The problematic relation between traumatic experience and narrative
has been a staple of trauma studies since Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience (1996);
for Bierce, the problem is simply that we need to make narrative sense of experience,
but trauma is symptomatically intractable to narrative. Psychological trauma, in his
stories, is the prime manifestation of narrative’s inadequacy to experience, and hence
his disbelief in the possibility of value secured through narrative form. Whether or
not the origins of this view lie in his own war trauma, the relation he posits between
trauma and narrative is reciprocal: psychological trauma becomes both cause and
effect of narrative dislocation.
There are multiple ways in which “One of the Missing” uses patterns of repetition
to give form to its material, but they tend to be strongly marked by dissonance, both
for the reader and for Searing himself. His smile is twice mentioned, for example, and
in both cases it arises from black humour: in the first instance, “He smiled at his own
method of estimating distance”—that is, his conclusion that he cannot have come far
because he is still alive (73); in the second, we are told that he had always smiled to
recall the occasion when he nearly killed himself by clubbing a man to death with his
cocked rifle, but also that “now he did not smile” (84). His callous sense of humour
is just one aspect of the mental resilience that the collapse of the building strips away
from him. Again, when he first regains consciousness he thinks that he has died and
been buried, and that his wife, accompanied by his children, is kneeling upon his
grave; this hallucination follows immediately after his own intention, in targeting the
retreating Confederates moments before, of “making a widow or an orphan . . .” (78).
It is also the first of two mentions of his own family, the solace of which is stripped
away in both cases. Here, he thinks his wife’s weight upon the grave is crushing him; a
little later, he momentarily reflects that although he cannot move he is at least facing
north, towards his wife and children, only to immediately exclaim, “Bah! . . . what
have they to do with it?” (85). These and other repetitions and parallels give form to
the narrative; at the same time, as foregrounded reflexive moments in the narrative,
they defamiliarize and ironize that form.
The struggle to impose form, to establish meaning, is fundamental to the psy-
chological impact of the traumatic situation in which Searing finds himself. His first
disoriented efforts to integrate his current state with his prior experience are full of
contradiction and incoherence; or else emphasise the gulf between present and past,
as above. His thought process is typically digressive, in flight from the unassimilable
event; but the reverse, a movement from irrelevance to relevance, also occurs. So, he
wanders deliriously into “pleasant memories of his childhood” and an adventure to
the terrifying “Dead Man’s Cave,” only to notice a metal ring around its entrance and
be brought abruptly back to the present (85–86). Here, the immediate phenomenon
(the barrel of the gun), instead of prompting a centrifugal movement of association,
 Eventuality in Fiction   297

functions as the terminus of his thought, drawing him back from escapism in a dis-
tressing reconvergence of memory with his present plight. That is to say, Searing’s
trauma is compounded by the fact that making sense of it just confirms the imminent
prospect of the only narrative closure left available to him, which is death.
Perhaps the most disturbing manifestation of this logic in the story occurs when
Searing, “caught like a rat in a trap” himself (79), is visited by some actual rats. Fearful
that they may trigger the rifle, he shoos them away; but there follows, in a paragraph
of its own, this sentence:

The creatures went away; they would return later, attack his face, gnaw away
his nose, cut his throat—he knew that, but he hoped by that time to be dead.
(87)

It is disturbing on several levels, the horrific image it presents being only the most
obvious. Beyond that, there is the revelation that Searing, who at this point in the
story is still ostensibly struggling to find a way out of his situation, expects to die and
indeed hopes it will be before the rats return. But beyond that, too, is the temporal dis-
location of the brutal narrative prolepsis lurking in “they would return later.” Because
the sentence’s focalization upon Searing’s perspective is in retrospective narration, the
future tense is backshifted. From the authorial perspective, the rats’ return is narrated
as having occurred, even though when the story ends they have not yet done so. What
Searing knows, then, is that this eventuality is as certain as if it had already happened.
The last related event of the story, in which his brother fails to recognize his corpse,
confirms for us that it is indeed certain.
The deathward momentum of narrative necessity in Bierce’s story seems to argue
that the achieved meaning narrative affords is somehow aligned with the collapse
of the conscious domain of human value back into physical matter, the body re-
duced to carrion for rats. Indeed, this is no more than a particularly bleak version
of the equation between narrative closure and death adumbrated by, for example,
Frank Kermode and Peter Brooks.9 Every narrative outcome, every formal closure
it achieves, is a figurative kind of death, suggesting that the best prospects for affir-
mation of life must lie in the other concept of eventuality, the provisional and plural
vistas of contingency. The impetus behind the literary complexification of narrative
is in this direction, opposing narrative’s teleological drive towards resolution by elab-
orating the scope of connotation within the system of meaning itself; postponing the
finality of an outcome in favour of the receding horizon of the implicit in semiosis.
To the extent that it manifests as a system of connotation, literary narrative neces-
sarily exceeds any bounded sense of communicative intentionality; the authorial
act of communication is less instrumental than gestural, not delivering a message
but indicating interpretative prospects that ramify without a determinate limit. The
literary use of narrative provides for continual renegotiation of the balance between
cognitive effort and interpretative reward that drives narrative sensemaking. In this
particular case, Bierce delineates the outlines of his intent to represent a physical fate
(Searing’s) as the epitome of a metaphysical one (his own and, he thinks, ours); but
298  Richard Walsh

where, and how far, that gesture directs us is an open question, and depends upon our
own pursuit of the centrifugal trajectories of association and inference.
Literary narrative confronts narrative’s sequential logic with its inadequacy to
the systemic complexity of life, and attempts to address that inadequacy by com-
plexifying narrative itself. This move deploys both the reflexive capacity of semiosis
and its unbounded openness to the implicit. It foregrounds the tension between the
intentionality of narrative communication and the complexity of semiotic systems,
in order to establish a parallel with the tension between narrative representation
and the systemic complexity of the empirical world. Through such an equivalence
literary narrative internalises the latter problem and becomes, to that extent, more
responsive to it. In doing so, it also develops a means of negotiating between necessity
and chance, by evoking an interpretative and representational hinterland, systemic
in nature, that accommodates the (narratively) arbitrary and random without con-
ceding to an absolute indeterminacy. Indeed, the term “Chaos Theory” (coined by
mathematician James Yorke) picks out just this feature of the behaviour of complex
dynamic systems—their deterministic production of unpredictable, apparently cha-
otic behaviour.
There is small comfort for narrative understanding, however, in the idea that sys-
temic behaviour is only apparently chaotic. Bierce describes the chaotic fallen timbers
of the demolished building as an “intricate, patternless system” (79), and in doing
so identifies a crucial gap between the concepts of system and pattern. To identify
phenomena as systemic does not in itself secure a cognitive grasp upon them; it does
not amount to making sense, because sense—intelligible form, or pattern—does not
inhere in the object itself (the system), but in the subject-object relation. Pattern, to
be pattern at all, needs both to be there, and to be discerned; it is an interpretative
perspective upon phenomena. Pattern, in other words, occupies the indefinite realm
of the implicit; that which is available to cognition, yet only realized by it. To artic-
ulate such a realization, cognitively or discursively, is to cash in the significance it
affords—but also recursively to make available further patterning, implicit within the
narrative’s own system of meaning, and so to displace and extend the implicit rather
than exhaust it.
Our interpretative engagement with our environment requires agency and
perspective, and the events of the story undermine Searing’s capacity for both. The
trauma of his experience radically disorients his sense of perspective—evaluative and
spatiotemporal—in ways that emphasise the interdependence of his mental and phys-
ical capacities, tying his cognitive agency to his embodied interaction with the world.
Searing’s conspicuous prowess, as first presented, is indeed both physical and mental;
but as one critic observes of his decline from supremely able scout to half-buried
unrecognized corpse, “A more pointed image of the disappearance of act and agent
into scene would be hard to find” (Elmer 456). The story explicitly strips away his
degrees of freedom, and in doing so figures narrative necessity as physical constraint.
Bierce specifies in detail the movements denied to Searing by the tangle of fallen
timbers, until the only action left for him to take is to thrust a length of wood against
his rifle’s trigger. In doing so he is resigning his life, and indeed he does die, but from
psychological rather than physical causes. Given Searing’s mistaken but plausibly
 Eventuality in Fiction   299

motivated belief that the rifle is still loaded, it makes no practical difference whether
or not it has in fact already discharged; the psychological effect of his fear converges
with the physical effect of the expected bullet so that, regardless of the actual state of
affairs, his need for narrative resolution equates with his death. The revelation that
the rifle is harmless, then, is for the reader alone; it allows for a darkly ironic re-
move from Searing’s perspective, but only at the moment of its necessary extinction.
By withholding this information, Bierce compels our full imaginative engagement
with Searing’s experience, disallowing the detached scrutiny of a suppositious omni-
science. By revealing it at this point, he abruptly and cynically redirects our attention
to the gap between Searing’s subjective torment and his actual circumstances, just
when the chance of an alternative outcome disappears.
I have so far dwelt upon the perspectival implications of narrative in evaluative
terms, but Bierce’s story very pointedly treats narrative perspective as first of all a
literal question of the subjective relation to environment; to situation and movement
in space and time. The motif of estimating distance and time recurs at several points
in the story, and it is the nub of its ending. The final paragraph just gives us Lieutenant
Searing’s conclusion that the body he sees in the collapsed building has been dead a
week, and tells us that he then moves on, “absently pulling out his watch as if to verify
his estimate of time. Six o’clock and forty minutes” (92). The passage achieves several
things simultaneously. The irrelevance of his watch’s clock time to the judgement
he has just made, on the basis of the temporality of physical evidence, is an ironic
commentary upon the mismatch between his estimate and the reality of the case.
The time given also refers us back to the previous occasion on which he consulted
his watch, twenty-two minutes earlier when he heard the fall of the building, and so
both confirms that his estimate is wildly wrong, and tells us how distorted Searing’s
own subjective experience of the passage of time has been since then, due to both
his initial delirium and the state of terror in which he ultimately dies. Bierce defa-
miliarizes temporality in his description of this final extreme state, both topically
and through an abrupt shift to the present tense: “Here is immortality in time—each
pain an everlasting life. The throbs tick off eternities” (88). The final contrast between
Lieutenant Searing’s estimate and the objective facts also serves a function beyond its
foregrounding of distorted temporality, however; it resolves the story on the theme of
spatiotemporal perspective that has run through it. Searing himself, in his trap, grap-
ples with multiple problems of perspective exacerbated by trauma and immobility.
His sense of distance, in particular, is emphasised: the ruins of the building around
him at first seem at a remote distance, “so great that it fatigued him” (79); once he has
recognized the muzzle of his rifle, it subsequently seems to have moved “somewhat
nearer” (84), then “an inconceivable distance away, and all the more sinister for that”
(86). But his brother’s final act of estimation most directly echoes a phrase from ear-
lier in the story: Searing’s own ironic “method of estimating distance,” based upon the
fact that he is still alive. This mock estimation is itself inextricable from his agency
and temporal perspective—“‘It seems a long time,’ he thought, ‘but I cannot have
come very far’” (73)—and it also alludes to the essential skill, for a scout, of actually
estimating distance.
300  Richard Walsh

The story says nothing explicit about this. Yet the question of the method of
such estimation does correlate with another detail, which is that Searing’s rifle, we are
told, is a Springfield, “but fitted with a globe sight and hair-trigger” (75). The reason
for mentioning the hair trigger is clear enough—it is essential to the plot—but what
we should make of the globe sight is less clear. Bierce’s detail is accurate, as a history
of Union army sharpshooters confirms (quoting an article in the New York Times
from the seventh of August 1861): “They will be armed with the most Improved
Springfield rifle, with a plain silver pin sight at the muzzle, and . . . the globe sight
at the breech” (Earley 11). Beyond verisimilitude, though, the detail highlights the
perspectival issue of sighting. Searing is on the point of using this sight when the
artillery shell strikes and prevents him from doing so; its primary significance proves
to be irrelevant (as, in a different sense, does that of the hair trigger). But sighting and
estimating distance are intimately related, through the standard method of parallax.
Sighting a distant object with the rifle, then closing the sighting eye and using the
other, will cause the muzzle pin to appear displaced sideways against the field. The
lateral distance of the displacement at the target can be assessed relative to the scale of
recognizable landmarks such as buildings or trees; the distance to the target will then
be approximately ten times greater. This parallax method works by triangulation: the
distance to the target is about ten times the lateral displacement, because the length of
the rifle barrel is about ten times the distance between your eyes.10 It is also, evidently,
a form of estimation grounded in embodied cognition, depending specifically upon
the binocular nature of our visual perception of our environment.
Bierce does not represent Searing making such an estimate of distance, nor
does he refer to the method by which a scout would do so. This reading delves a
long way into the excess of connotation implicit in the semiotic system of the story,
and may seem arbitrary; it is not plausibly part of Bierce’s deliberate communicative
intention. But that intention does include a prompt to engage in this way with the
domain of connotation beyond the closed form of his narrative. Bierce’s intention
is best understood as a comprehensive gesture of negation, the authorial rhetoric of
which doubles his protagonist’s psychological struggle: Searing’s inescapable fall from
omnicompetent agent to corpse is shadowed by Bierce’s own implacable reduction
of narrative meaning to its deathward drive. This bleak demonstration of narrative’s
inability to secure a solid foundation of meaning or values, pursued through narra-
tive’s own reflexive and implicit potentialities, nonetheless would seem to achieve
literary value in the irony of its very negation, as we shall see. But it is also more than
communicative; it becomes a performative gesture that strips narrative down to its
bare logic, shedding implicit meanings along the way, and so does more than it says.
An answering gesture of interpretation, then, should attend to the complex net-
work of connotations beyond the linear narrative form of the story, the coherence of
which is repudiated by its own reflexive turns. This is not an invitation to interpre-
tative chaos, however; to discern an implicit motif, such as the idea of parallax as an
exemplar of situated embodied cognition, is to claim that such a pattern of meaning
is in some sense there. And the pattern is indeed there. The story foregrounds sev-
eral moments of situated cognition in which the signs of the environment are read.
Lieutenant Searing’s final reading of the scene of Searing’s death is one of these, and
 Eventuality in Fiction   301

notable for being utterly wrong; but Searing himself repeatedly makes inferences
from his environment, and much more successfully. Early in the story he relaxes his
stealthy approach through the woods when, having “rightly interpreted the signs,
whatever they were” (74), he concludes that the enemy positions ahead have been
abandoned. In the immediate aftermath of the building’s collapse he deduces that
his period of unconsciousness had lasted only a few seconds, from the dust that was
still settling around him (80–81). He determines from the shadows he can see in his
trapped position that he is facing north (85). Most pointedly, though, when he notices
the muzzle of his rifle in front of him, he establishes where it is pointing by means,
precisely, of parallax:

By closing either eye he could look a little way along the barrel—to the point
where it was hidden by the rubbish that held it. He could see the one side,
with the corresponding eye, at apparently the same angle as the other side
with the other eye. Looking with the right eye, the weapon seemed to be
directed at a point to the left of his head, and vice-versa. He was unable to
see the upper surface of the barrel, but could see the under surface of the
stock at a slight angle. The piece was, in fact, aimed at the exact centre of his
forehead. (82)

This passage both epitomises Searing’s cognitive competence and establishes the
narrative eventuality that will determine the inexorable course of the rest of the story.
Searing’s physical agency having already been almost entirely stripped away, from
this point the breadth of his cognitive perspective also progressively narrows as his
fear intensifies, until the point where “Nothing could now unfix his gaze from the
little ring of metal with its black interior” (87–88). Bierce’s story insists upon the
pitiless drive of narrative necessity towards death, and exhibits scorn for the comforts
of narrative in the face of trauma; yet this outcome is precipitated by an eventuality
of a quite different kind, an ostentatious irruption of unassimilable chance into the
narrative order. For Bierce himself, such contingency is only intelligible within the
frame of a cosmic narrative order he can neither really conceptualize nor believe; and
a non-narrative order of eventuality is no order at all. For him, the orientation of nar-
rative form towards its end can offer no achieved meaning beyond the corporeal fact
of a soldier’s tormented corpse, unrecognizable even to his nearest relation. But he
demands too much of narrative, and affirms too little in consequence; and the literary
value of irony itself helps to explain why. It is a reflexive metavalue, here deriving
from Bierce’s implied critique of narrative rather than being a direct achievement of
narrative. Irony achieves form under a sign of negation, and in doing so necessarily
establishes a displaced positive value of some kind. The relation between achieved
form and ironic negation is cyclical, however; everything irony gives it can also take
way. While readers may prefer to dwell in the phase of this cycle when achieved value
comes to the fore, Bierce himself is not inclined to do so. For him, the only final
ground of meaning is death, and it is final order that he demands. Yet the corporeal
fact of cognitive embodiment does not equate with death, but with the open borders
of sense, the domain of the implicit that mediates between narrative knowledge and
302  Richard Walsh

our experiential continuity with the systemic environment to which we belong, in

life and in medias res. Reading Bierce’s story against the grain, we can attend to the
qualities of narrative sensemaking in process rather than the chimera of achieved
meaning; which is to situate narrative logic, and its capacity for the provisional artic-
ulation of value, with respect to its premises in embodied cognition rather than its
inevitable conclusion.

Endnotes
1. Perhaps the most useful precedent for my approach here is provided by the notion of a “tutor text”
[texte tuteur], as invoked by Roland Barthes in S/Z (e.g., 14–15).
2. I owe thanks to John Pier for drawing my attention to this story, in the context of a collaborative
project on complexity and chance for the ALEA research network and the prospective two-vol-
ume edited collection, Figures of Chance: The Imagination of Contingency in the West (16th to 21st
Centuries).
3. Both “One of the Missing” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” are collected in volume one
of In the Midst of Life (the collection of stories originally published under the title of Tales of Sol-
diers and Civilians in 1891). All subsequent references are to the text of this volume, as published
in 1909.
4. The implications of this view of narrative as fundamentally a mode of cognition are elaborated in
Walsh, “Narrative Theory for Complexity Scientists.”
5. The only other notable author to write about his experiences as a Civil War soldier was Sidney
Lanier.
6. See Donald Blume’s extended discussion (83–98).
7. Blume attempts to establish both the Confederate captain and Searing’s brother as points of moral
contrast in the story (85–87).
8. Bierce’s ambivalence about war, and his inability to affirm positive values beyond it, are the focus
of Giorgio Mariani’s “Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War Stories and the Critique of the Martial Spirit.”
9. The formal conception of narrative resolution as death is a theme explored by Kermode in The
Sense of an Ending (1968) and by Brooks in Reading for the Plot (1984), especially in his chapter
on Freud and Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
10. Explanations of parallax are easily found online. One thorough account, which covers both the
application discussed here and estimating the distance of stars in astronomy, is at http://www.
phy6.org/stargaze/Sparalax.htm.

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Blume, Donald T. Ambrose Bierce’s Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical Study. Kent, OH:
Kent State Univ. Press, 2004.
 Eventuality in Fiction   303

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
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Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
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